Brendan’s Comments

Happy to see an update to the report, but was a bit thrown by the country summary fact sheets. The various facets (video games, music, etc) were in different positions on the page for each country. This as a bit annoying to hunt for and compare across countries on the mobile device.

I wood recommend laying out pages like that with the same structure in the future.

It still looks pretty similar to me. I can tell the details are different, but I wouldn't say the layout is substantially changed. It felt like I was playing "spot the differences" like the picture game in a kids magazine. That said, I completely support your case as parody/ sucks site.

I'm more curious why this was filed in canada. Are you based north of the border?

You fail to see the big picture. I would consider it an amazing opportunity to get my books into every school in the USA, even if I made nothing up front.

Consider that there are roughly 80 million students in the USA. If you can convince just 1% of those students to pick up your book and try to read it, you've just had 800,000 reads. If just 1% of those readers actually _liked_ your book, you've just picked up 8,000 new fans. If they buy 1 book each, you just made $24,000.

If your books are good, you'll find more fans buying more books, making you more money. If your books are terrible, maybe you only make $5-10 thousand, and that's ok, because you didn't spend that much time on it, or it's just a side hobby.

My thoughts are that the risk isn't big enough for the "PAE" to care about the legitimacy of their claim. If we forced frivolous aggressors to cover legal costs for the defendant, they might consider the lawsuits more caeefully before moving forward.

Current system makes it most profitable to throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. We need to change the incentive structure.

Your revisionist view of the world must makes things pretty exciting. You can just pretend history agrees with you, and if you truly believe in your river of shit, you don't even need to worry about anyone pointing out th massive inaccuracies.

If you could wave a magic wand and have the drugs go away, sure. But sadly that's not possible. Outright bans just don't work. End of story. What vdoes work is education and treatment. Coincidentally, these approaches are also much cheaper than (ineffective) enforcement, and have less collateral damage.

If my comment is deemed a winner I demand it be broadcasted into outer space for archiving by aliens. Can't seem to trsut anyone "local" to not ruin everything.

However, I will be secretely witholding the full copyright (a la Righthaven Pseudo-transfer) and my intergalactic heirs will sue every specias in the universe in 500 years. This will be possible thanks to the next 20 copyright term extensions, each for an additional 20 years, based on the Titan convention and the Ceres agreement.

Does the statement "You can download movies and tv at no cost from the pirate bay .se" also set off alarms in your imaginary world? Because that's functionally equivalent to a hyperlink, just less convenient.

Rights against discrimination are usually against an explicit list of criteria. Race, gender, etc.

I would think a company could choose to offer discounts to customers it feels promote it games well. Much like sending out vouchers to good customers, or denying business to jerks, that is not "discriminatory" in the negative rights-based sense.

Since it's free to post, and Mike is committed to a fully open discussion with ACs, we need to find another way to make annoying posters pay.

I say make them pay with effort and time, using Captchas or something similar. The more annoying a user is considered by the community, the more captchas they must complete before posting. The most unwelcome posters could still submit, but would have to answer 5 or 10 captchas. They need to really want to post that annoying message.

This could run off the stats of the Insightful/Funny/Report buttons, or add new buttons for general positive/negative contribution.

Track by user account, if logged in. If not logged in, track by IP and/or cookie and/or browser fingerprint. If blocking cookies, javascript and anonymizing via TOR or similar, a default low-value treatment should be applied.

While I recognize that there are posters anonymizing themselves via these means (proactive hiding beyond simply posting as AC) are doing so for legitimate reasons, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of such posters are troll-ish in nature.

Anyone like the idea of slowing down the trolls and annoying ACs, or is it too exclusionary? I would like to explicitly state that no one should be prevented from posting, only annoyed as they annoy us.